Monday, 8 January 2018

watching geese, cooking carrots

We're embracing the technology here on board Eve; after wrestling with making a Kindle version of Drawn Chorus, I've been playing with iMovie on the Mac, to make a poetry film. Here's the result, Vol de Nuit. It's got some neat slow motion goose action at the start. The poem's about the time I was getting ready to ride down to Weymouth to join the ship, and saw the geese flying high over Bristol, lit by the city's lights. It was an awesome sight.

I've been trying to clear out the galley cupboards, which involves eating up all the things that've been sitting in there for a very long time. So I've been eating lots of pulses; and rediscovered the joy of cannellini beans, which are nice cold with olive oil or hot in a stew. I've also started trying to modify my vegetable habits, which usually involve buying nice fresh ones and then waiting till they're rotten and stinking before throwing them into the bushes. So on Friday I made curried carrot soup. It was really rather good, and solved the problem of what to do with big bag of carrots.

It also meant playing with the moulin-legumes, which is one of my fave things in the batterie de cuisine. It reminds me of the time on a teenage exchange visit to France, when we stayed with my host's elderly relative in a Paris suburb. It was a grand house full of relics of French Indochina, and the kitchen was huge and full of interesting things, reminiscent of those illustrations that John Minton did for Elizabeth David's french cookery books. (There's a fine new book about John Minton, from the Mainstone Press, by the way)